RENE GUENON 4

Rene Guenon, East and West (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Martin Lings (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1924, 2001) ("The civilization of the modern West appears in history as a veritable anomaly: among all those which are known to us more or less completely, this civilization is the only one that has developed along purely material lines, and this monstrous development . . . has been accomplished, as indeed it was fated to be, by a corresponding intellectual regress . . . This regress has reached such a point that the Westerners of today no longer know what pure intellect is; in fact they do not even suspect that anything of the kind can exist; hence their disdain, not only for Eastern civilization, but also for the Middle Ages of Europe, whose spirit escapes them scarcely less completely. How is the interest of a purely speculative knowledge to be brought home to people for whom intelligence is nothing but a means of acting on matter and turning it to practical ends, and for whom science, in their limited understanding of it, is above all important insofar as it may be applied to industrial purposes?" Id. at 11. "[T]he indiscriminate diffusion of scraps of knowledge is always more harmful than beneficial, for it can only bring about a general state of disorder and anarchy. [] A half knowledge  . . . is far more injurious than pure and simple ignorance; better for a man to know nothing at all then to have his mind encumbered with false ideas, often ineradicable, especially when they have been inculcated from his earliest years. The ignorant man retains at least the possibility of learning if he is given the opportunity: he may possess a certain natural 'common sense' which, together with the consciousness that he ordinarily has of his own incompetence, is enough to save him from much folly. On the contrary, the man who has been half taught has nearly always a deformed mentality, and what he thinks he knows makes him so self-satisfied that he imagines himself capable to talking about everything, no matter what; he does so at random, and the greater his incompetence, the greater his glibness: so simple do all thing appear to one who knows nothing!" Id. at 41. "To sum up what we think in a few words, we can say this: every truth is exclusive of error, not of another truth (or, to express ourselves better, of another aspect of the truth); and, we repeat, all exclusivism other than that is nothing more than the mark of a systematic outlook, which is incomparable with the understanding of the universal principles." Id. at 141. I am reading this work in a context in which I am witnessing, experiencing, suffering, etc., the anti-intellectual drift of undergraduate- and graduate-level education. Teaching law (that is, teaching in a "professional school," I see the emphasis on preparing law students to be "practice-ready," and for them to begin "branding" themselves at the earliest opportunity. The exploration of ideas, the development of true intellect, is dead! I am also reading this work in the context of frustration with American yoga, with its emphasis on the asanas (that is, the poses) and its complete trivialization of the spiritual, the philosophical, and the intellectual aspects of traditional yoga.).